How
did it happen? How did a nice girl like me, born on the East Coast,
raised in the Midwest in the Fifties, and educated at a conservative
Methodist university in the South, how did I end up in Berkeley,
California, the land of acceptance and diversity?
It was love, of course. Only love. Love is why I've called California
my home for 35 years. I live surrounded by extremes
of lifestyle because of love for a man who hated extremes of
temperature.
As
a manager for a mega-corporation in Delaware, where I was born, my father moved every time he
received a promotion. We packed my collection of miniature porcelain
animals, Madam Alexander storybook dolls, the heirloom child's rocker
and the pineapple four-poster bed, the dog, the hamster, the bird and
the cat-- and moved five times before I finished high school. Each move
took us due west as the crow flies, straight through the middle of the
country.
I grew up during the Eisenhower years in states where we called anything
over 1,500 feet a mountain, states where the school year ended in mid-May
so kids could help on the farms, states where boys too young to have
acne could legally drive a tractor down the road from one field to the
next. We stayed the longest in Kansas
where the temperature climbed over 110 for weeks on
end. The sound of hundreds of grasshoppers leaping in the dry grass with
each step you took just meant it was August, and on a clear day from the
top of a barn outside of Kansas City
you could see a grain elevator in Ulysses, way over
near the Colorado
border.
But when we drove east to be with relatives for the holidays, it felt
like home. And when we traveled to
New England
? Well, that was like going back to the Old Country.
All my genes lined up in harmony as soon as we crossed over
the
Massachusetts
state line. It was that pilgrim stuff, Paul Revere's
house, the witches of Salem, I don't know, but my blood just pulsed in rhythm
with the clippety-clop of Ichabod Crane's galloping horse. Home at last,
home at last, it sang.
Then,
just as the Beatles came onto the scene, I went south to nursing school
in North Carolina, where the dorm mothers struggled to keep all of us
little white co-eds from crossing the tracks to the dizzy world of civil
rights marches and smoky night clubs where loose-jointed colored men
with one gold tooth danced and beckoned.
Although Duke was officially
desegregated, the hospital lobby had three bathrooms. Men, Women, and
Colored. Roadside restaurant windows had small cardboard signs beside
the door, clearly visible from the road: White Only. Drinking fountains
everywhere had "White" or "Colored" posted above
them. The cool Gothic hush of the university chapel seemed far removed
from the revival tents beside muddy rivers where dark-skinned,
hand-clapping people in white robes practiced immersion baptism on
sultry July afternoons.
Most of the girls in the dorm grew up below the
Mason-Dixon Line
, and my mother swears I came home at Thanksgiving,
freshman year, with a southern accent. However, I soon met another
freshman, a tall, thin boy from Boston
with kind eyes. We dated in his restored 1931 Model
A Ford during those honeysuckle humid evenings, and he taught me to
drive a stick shift, double-clutching to slow down on the twisty,
dogwood and magnolia-lined back roads between Durham
and
Chapel Hill
. A few years later we talked of marriage, and I
hugged myself, happy that I would live in New England
forever and ever.
What
I didn't know until we actually became engaged was that he hated
extremes of temperature. 'Comfort' was his middle name. He had come to
school in the south to get away from
Boston
winters. And he planned on living in
California
to get away from Boston
summers.
"But what about spring and fall?" I bleated.
"In
California
spring starts in February and lasts until November.
You'll
love California," he promised, unfolding a AAA map with the
ocean on the
wrong
edge of the page. Oceans belong on the right. If he dragged me to
California, I knew I'd always be turning north when I meant to
head south.
I
sneaked another peak at the map. Wrong. It just looked wrong, wrong,
wrong.
We
drove west, through Pennsylvania
where I was potty-trained while my mother and I
lived with her aunt. Mother stuck pins in a wall map and waited for my
father to come home alive from the war.
"What about lilacs on
Memorial Day and apple cider in October?" I asked.
"Cinco
de Mayo, tacos, and Margaritas with fresh lime juice," he crooned,
licking my earlobe.
We breezed through Ohio
where I once went to kindergarten with Polish
immigrants and bought dill pickles to crunch on the way home from
school.
"What about Paul Revere? And Concord
and
Lexington
and white churches on the village green?" I
reminded him.
"They have Junipero Serra and
San Diego
and the Spanish missions."
We drove through Illinois
where I raised a baby robin that fell from a tree
and
waited in a squeaky pew for my best friend to finish making her
confession in the dusty Catholic church that smelled of incense and
dripping candle wax.
"But what about maple trees changing color and
burning leaves and daffodils and the Vermont Country Store?" I
whined.
"There
are redwoods in California, and poppies. And Gump's," he whispered in the
middle of the night somewhere in Missouri.
"Lobster!"
I shouted, certain that I had him there. "Yeah, what about lobster?
And the Boston
Celtics?" Surely he would turn around. But no,
he drove straight west.
"Crab
on Fisherman's Wharf and the San Francisco Giants," he said, giving
my knee a lingering pat as we crossed into Kansas, and I saw that same grain elevator about a million
miles away in Ulysses. Forced early off the highway
that
night by winds that blew tumbleweeds against our car with the forceful
rat-a-tat-tat of shotgun pellets, we actually spent that night in
Ulysses in a $7-a-night motel with no towels.
We were certain the Indians were attacking when we awakened as dawn
blasted across the prairie. Relentless drumming and woo-woo war chants
made our walls vibrate like the aspen leaves beside the road. We peaked
out the flyspecked window and saw that the Tom-Tom Trading Post on the
opposite side of the highway had just opened for business.
We headed for Colorado
and the Rockies
where I had gone camping with my parents when I was
ten. Where I caught rainbow trout in a frigid lake on fire with the
colors of a western sunset, and we took the steam train from Durango
to Silverton. I saw mummies of the cliff dwellers at
Mesa Verde and understood for the first time that people who die are
really dead forever.
Then we reached Nevada. There's a lot of Nevada.
I slept, I think.
"What's that?" I asked when I opened my eyes.
"The
Sierra Nevada
," he whispered with pride, as if he had built
them especially for me.
"And that? And that, and that?" I asked, sitting up a little
straighter.
"Lake Tahoe. Yosemite. And those redwoods I told you about back
in Missouri. Or maybe it was
Kansas," he said as we climbed and climbed and
climbed.
"Somehow
I don't think we're in Kansas
any more..." I guessed as we left a wide and
fertile valley behind us and began to feel the coolness of an ocean
again.
"
Santa Barbara
and the mission. And that's the--"
"
Pacific Ocean
!" I shouted. I made him stop the car so I could
take a picture. It was the wrong ocean, of course. But still.
"Wow!" I breathed, looking north and south.
"Just
wait," he grinned, turning north.
"Jeez," I whispered, holding my breath and looking down, down,
down.
"Big Sur.
I told you so."
For hours and hours I said nothing. We ate lunch on the most incredible
stretch of coastline in the world.
"What's
that noise?" I asked, cocking my head and straining my ears toward
the cove below.
"Otters
cracking shellfish open. They hold a rock on their tummies and smash the
shells against it."
"Yeah,
right!" I sneered, taking another bite of tangy sourdough bread.
And
then I saw one.
We
continued north. The ocean was still on the wrong side of the road, but
I thought maybe I could get used to it.
"Omigod.
Omigod, omigod, omigod. That must be..."
"Uh-huh.
That's San Francisco."
"I
think I'm going to love California,"
I said, and I kissed him
.
